Endings Are Where We Begin
by ChapterEight
Summary: Their lives could be measured by the changing years and days and minutes, but Ned couldn't measure their changing feelings the same way, no matter how much he wished he could. Endings bled into beginnings and beginnings into endings.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Pushing Daisies_ , although I wish I'd had the power to stop it from being cancelled too soon. Bryan Fuller, Warner Bros., and others have the pleasure of owning it. I'm not making any money from this story.

 **Author's Notes:** This story will explore the lives of our favorite characters after the end of the series, particularly how Ned and Chuck's relationship would evolve the longer they loved each other without being able to touch. As you can tell from the labels, it will end up as a Ned/Olive.

* * *

Their first really close call happened in the Pie Hole, when Ned was running late because he'd been up into the wee hours of the morning perfecting his newest contraption. Chuck had been with him, of course, as he'd invented the device for her benefit and the rigorous testing had been only for her pleasure, but she was always up at the same time every morning and looking as beautiful as always no matter how late they'd been up the night before. Ned, on the other hand, had stumbled out of bed an hour after his alarm had gone off, looking little better than some of the corpses he touched at the morgue.

He had rushed through the shower and taken the stairs down three at a time, and had barely noticed the jingle of the bell above the door or the new waitress's smiling face as he crossed the restaurant in four long strides and rounded the counter into the kitchen.

Chuck was halfway through the doorway, apparently bringing a pie out to the display case. She gasped at the sight of him bearing down on her, her pert lips parting in surprise, but Ned couldn't make a sound. He tried to stop as best he could, his sneakers skidding on the recently-waxed floor and his body twisting painfully sideways to avoid her.

His forearm brushed the fabric of her floral-print dress somewhere in the vicinity of her hip as he fell against the doorjamb. He was afraid to look, to see if she was dead again forever, and so his eyes stayed trained on the patterns of three different kinds of plums that had splattered across the floor when Chuck had dropped the pie.

Then her sweet voice interrupted his panicked musings. "Ned… Ned?"

His eyes trailed up her toned calves, covered with purple splotches of plum, and past the knee-length hem of her dress up and finally up to her worried face.

"Ned, are you okay?"

It had been five months, twenty-one days, forty-nine minutes, and six seconds since Ned had rung Aunts Vivian and Lily's doorbell with Chuck standing next to him, the sunlight shining through the natural highlights of her hair and her eyes shining even brighter still. There had been shock and then acceptance and then tears of mingled sadness and joy, and then Lily Charles had promptly returned to her usual acerbic self and told Ned that if he really loved Charlotte he'd leave her alone so she'd be safe from him. One of these days they would accidentally touch, and she would be dead forever. Lily's fears were somehow more pressing than Charles Charles's had been, since she was a mother who had actually lost a daughter and lived to grieve it.

They hadn't made it quite six months before her fears had almost come true.

Ned looked into Chuck's worried eyes and his heart made its way into his throat. "Am _I_ okay?" he asked, his voice rising an octave higher than normal. "I almost—you almost—we—You want to know if _I'm_ okay?"

"You hit the wall pretty hard," she replied, gesturing towards his arm, which he only then noticed was throbbing with pain. At his incredulous look, she sighed. "Ned, it's okay. I'm okay. You're hurt."

"But it might not have been! I almost—!"

"Hey, are y'all all right?" interrupted the new waitress, Sarah. She was a tall, dark-haired girl with inquisitive blue eyes and an even more inquisitive look on her face as she watched Ned and Chuck stand off from opposite sides of the wide kitchen doorway.

"Fine," answered Ned. They were not fine.

Sarah gave them another quizzical look and turned to cut a slice of cherry pie. After a few seconds—three beats of Ned's gradually slowing heart—Chuck turned to the little space between the wall and the fridge where they kept the broom and mop. Ned stood frozen in place until she walked back towards him, when he realized that he had to get out of her way.

"Coming," she chirped.

Ned tried to smile, although it didn't reach his eyes. "Going."

He tried to focus on rolling out a new batch of pie crust, but he kept watching Chuck out of the corner of his eye as she cleaned up the mess they had made. The skirt of her dress flowed out from the waist and floated around her hips and legs, but when she bent over to finish wiping up the last of the plums, he could see the outline of her hips. He tried to remember how she'd looked the night before, spread out nude across his bed as he'd stood over her and watched from a safe distance, but his mind kept going back to the terror he'd felt when his arm brushed against her a few minutes ago when they'd fallen.

He could remember how her body heat had scorched his skin when he'd touched her through the thin fabric covering her hips. It had just been the briefest of touches, but it was more physical contact than they'd had the entire night before. He wanted more of it. He _wanted_ to feel her bare skin with his bare skin.

Only the throbbing pain in his arm drew him back to reality, and he inhaled deeply through his nostrils and tore his eyes away from her. When he looked down at the dough he'd been rolling out, he'd worn it so thin that it would be unusable.

"Hey, Ned," Chuck broke into his musings, "it's okay, really. I'm okay. We'll just have to be more careful, maybe update our safety precautions."

"Yeah," replied Ned, because he didn't trust himself to speak further.


End file.
